The Virginian

Friday, June 27, 2014

Chelsea Clinton's not interested in money she says. Growing up up the White House and having mega-millioniare parents, being the heir to a family fortune does that to people.

In Chelsea the Clintons had finally become true aristocrats, finally left their Little Rock roots. Chelsea had joined that elite group which has had money for so long it bores them. She, as the British well knew of the upper classes, finally accepted her duty to rule, shouldered the burden and paid the sad price for a life cursed with luxury and privilege.

Monday, June 23, 2014

To understand the latest outrage in the IRS scandal, mull over what might happen if regulators found significant evidence to implicate Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in an insider trading scheme.

Let’s say Blankfein asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to answer any questions. Say Goldman was subpoenaed to provide all of Blankfein’s emails. Goldman replied that, instead of complying with the subpoena, it was itself reviewing the emails in question and was considering which ones to release.

Now imagine that, nearly a year later, Goldman admitted that it had not, in fact, reviewed the emails in question, because they had been lost in a computer crash two months before it claimed to be reviewing them. Imagine Goldman also said copies of the emails were lost, because while under subpoena, it had destroyed the “backup tapes” (whatever those are) that held them and that it had also thrown away Blankfein’s actual hard drive.

The thing about dogs eating homework is, it could actually happen. This can’t.

This is “The dog ate my hard drive, broke into another building, ate the backup of the hard drive, then broke into six other top officials’ offices and ate their hard drives also.”

What we learned about the IRS this week is that there is an obvious criminal coverup that comes in addition to the possible underlying crimes. Prosecutions need to be brought against all of those involved.

Guilty, Guity, Guilty

The accumulation of circumstantial evidence the the Obama administration is involved in a massive cover-up that it used the IRS to illegally harass it's political foes is now overwhelming. The coincidences stack up from the IRS official, Lois Lerner, taking the Fifth to the disappearance of her e-mails due to an unlikely combination of a hard disk crash and the destruction of the back-up files.

That's the alibi that the Obama administration is offering for not providing Congress the information it asked for, and they're sticking to it. Sorry, it does not pass the smell test even if Democrats in and out of government claim to believe it.

It does go to show how the ethics of Congress has fallen since the days when Richard Nixon was told he had to resign of face impeachment ... by members of his own party! Today the Democrats are protecting a crook in the White House for base political purposes no matter what damage it does to the fabric of society and the loss of trust by the people that government will treat them fairly.

And the press, long the handmaiden of the Democrat Party is now an active participant of corruption and criminality at the highest levels. What a change a few decades have made.

At this point in the Watergate scandal, which ended with President Richard Nixon resigning rather than face the charge that he had unsuccessfully “endeavored” to use the IRS against his political foes, much of the media were already screaming “Guilty.”

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

What morally depraved moster would write this?

"It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.... Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide."

Here’s a flashback to what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

So – what does all this add to ? The websites are abuzz again, with the old question “dunce or traitor?” I fail to see why it’s one or the other. I very much think it’s both. It’s traitor because he was raised to be a traitor. I don’t know how to link L. Neil Smith’s article, so I’ll just say that he pointed out that someone who was raised as a communist, is in fact a communist. Why would he be anything else? It would require a Road of Damascus experience, and I don’t remember his telling us of one. And trust me, he would have.

So, there’s the traitor part. But in it there’s the dunce part too.

Look, I’m not going to consider whether or not communists can be very smart. Maybe they can. I’ve never met any, though.

Oh, raw IQ, sure. But people don’t move and choose through raw IQ. My brother is brilliant. He’s also a deeply conventional man. This mean his thoughts move only in the “approved thoughts for brilliant people” mode of the last century – that is, leftist. We have a childhood friend who is an European communist leader (I suppose not openly, but who knows?) Is he stupid? Not raw IQ. But communism requires him to believe certain things. Such as “the right people” will naturally seize power after a collapse.

That’s what we’re dealing with here. Given Obama’s performance off script, I don’t think his dunceness is that smart. Look, as with his being a red diaper baby, it doesn’t even take much guessing. The evidence is RIGHT before our eyes. If he were smart, it would have been shouted from the rooftops. IQ? Grades? Achievement of some sort?

Come on, the biggest thing they have to tout is the fact that he was editor of the Harvard Law review, even if he published nothing. That means IQ, grades and achievement are all of a nullity or very close. Which – yes, I’m going to be crude here – in an age of political correctness when Harvard would want to give him a “win” (i.e. good grades/honors) just because of his color and his exotic religious background, means he must be something special in the way of dumb.

That is important, to an extent, because it means to the extent he’s in control, we’ll get dunce-moves.

But he’s not fully in control. From the disabled credit card checks, to the carefully scripted campaign that he clearly had bugger all to do with, it’s been clear all along someone else is driving this train. And that person might or might not be a dunce, but they are, definitely a true believer.

The problem posed by “dunce or traitor” is that the answer is both. He is a traitor, but to the extent that it’s not working, it’s because he’s also a dunce. And whether he’s a dunce in IQ or an ideology-impaired-dunce the result is the same.

For instance, have you guys figured out yet that OWS’s was supposed to be an attempt at a “proletarian revolution”? No? If you look at it, it becomes clear. Raised on stories of proletarian revolution, they thought if they squeezed us just enough, and then provided a spark – OWS screaming about the 1% — the country would spontaneously rise up in a communist revolution.

This was obvious to me, because I KNOW communist myth.

Then there was gun control, which has failed, even despite Fast and Furious. And Fast and Furious is something that only crazy, delusional and dumb people would dream up.

Someone brought up in another country understands what can happen, what Communism means in reality, not in theory. Read the whole thing.

At any other time, the growing crisis on the Mexican border, with tens of thousands of unaccompanied young people crossing illegally into the United States, might dominate the news. Yet the situation has received less attention than it might amid the furor over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's primary defeat, the collapse of Iraq, the continuing Bergdahl matter, and Hillary Clinton's book tour. They're all genuinely important news stories, and they've crowded out disaster at the border.

But whether or not many people noticed, this was the week in which the Obama administration's attempts to deflect blame for the border crisis fell apart.

Monday, June 16, 2014

The two cashiers working that evening were chatting with one another, hardly paying attention to their work, which they were doing at a snail’s pace. The customer in front of me had a mislabeled product so the girl just stopped working and waited for a manager. It’s not laziness or attitude. The two girls were just working at a pace based on their own weird internal metronome.

That’s CPT. Even the most mundane tasks will take twice the time they do in SWPL-ville and no one thinks much of it.

WASHINGTON—More than a week after President Barack Obama's cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime....

"What exactly is the news hook here?" asked Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the CBS Evening News. "Is this an upbeat human-interest story about a 'day in the life' of a bloodthirsty president who likes to kill people? Or is it more of an examination of how Obama's unusual upbringing in Hawaii helped to shape the way he would one day viciously butcher two helpless citizens in their own home?"

"Or maybe the story is just that murder is cool now," Kaplan continued. "I don't know. There are a million different angles on this one."

So far, the president's double-homicide has not been covered by any major news outlets. The only two mentions of the heinous tragedy have been a 100-word blurb on the Associated Press wire and an obituary on page E7 of this week's edition of the Lake County Examiner.

While Obama has expressed no remorse for the grisly murders—point-blank shootings with an unregistered .38-caliber revolver—many journalists said it would be irresponsible for the press to sensationalize the story.

"There's been some debate around the office about whether we should report on this at all," Washington Post seniorreporter Bill Tracy said while on assignment at a local dog show. "It's enough of a tragedy without the press jumping in and pointing fingers or, worse, exploiting the violence. Plus, we need to be sensitive to the victims' families at this time. Their loved ones were brutally, brutally murdered, after all."

Race in Sports

Remember Watergate? The press was obsessed with Nixon and made sure that the American people were too.

Nowadays there’s a story buried deep inside the local newspapers that the IRS has been caught red-handed harassing a president’s political foes, and the public seems willing to accept the president’s word that it’s just another “phony scandal” like the four dead Americans at an unprotected consulate in a Middle Eastern hell-hole, or the 200-plus Mexicans killed by guns provided to south-of-the-border drug gangs by our federal government’s gun-running operation, or the gang members being allowed entry north-of-the-border by a non-enforcement policy, or the many brave American veterans dead due to the neglector a government-run health care system, or any of countless other recent incidents that once would have had the country riled up. Now the key high-ranking figure in the IRS’ harassment of conservative groups is invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a Congressional investigation of this “phony scandal,” there are two years of her e-mails that have been suspiciously erased by a claimed computer crash that is every bit as dubious as that accidental-erasure-during-a-yoga-routine that was offered during the Watergate days, and would be laughed at by IRS agents if a private business came up with such a flimsy excuse for failing to provide information during an audit, and yet the story is treated only briefly by the most of the media and doesn’t even rate so much as mention in “All the News That’s Fit to Print” on the pages of the New York Times. The average citizen is blissfully unaware of the story, and certainly not clamoring for impeachment.

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

When you spend considerable time and money becoming educated you expect a reward for your effort. When that doesn't happen, either because your education is not needed or the supply of educated people exceeds the demand, the result could be terror or revolution.

Governments like expanding the numbers of the educated because it is the kind of goal they can set themselves and are more or less certain of reaching. All you have to do is pass a law saying children must attend school for such and such a length of time, and in the case of tertiary education, to lower standards of entry to university and of graduation therefrom. Furthermore, governments can present the expanded numbers as a triumph of their own policy and evidence of their own benevolence, for everyone knows that, if education is a good thing, the more of it the better.

That this results in a bad fit between the education that the young receive and what they will be called upon to do in adult life concerns governments far less. When graduates, however, discover that they will be lucky if they can get an ill-paying job that they would have been able to do by the age of sixteen at the latest, they are likely to be disillusioned and angry; they will feel that they have been deprived of something that they were promised. No group is more dangerous than the disgruntled literate, and if jobs cannot be invented for them, some of them will invent jobs of their own, among them saving the world by means of an idiotic general idea. What in youth is called idealism is more often resentment.

It's what happened in Africa and is beginning to happen here. Read the whole thing.

But the climate fraudsters are getting rich. One out of three isn't bad.

Ten years ago, the Pentagon paid for a climate study that put forth many scary scenarios.

Consultants told the military that, by now, California would be flooded by inland seas, The Hague would be unlivable, polar ice would be mostly gone in summer, and global temperatures would rise at an accelerated rate as high as 0.5 degrees a year.

“we can see from the situation in Ukraine this kind of ED” –which he explained in Chinese was a military abbreviation for something that may have meant “extended deployment” – “has become the male type of ED problem – erectile dysfunction.”

If you're married in Miami, you might want to get out of town this summer. No, not to avoid the hurricanes -- to avoid a nasty divorce.

A new report blames global warming for rising rates of infidelity, especially bad news for couples in Miami, where rising tides and raging hurricanes remind us all how much extracurricular sex we could be having on a daily basis.